Steve Buckley: Winning era means little to today’s Patriots

No longer Super

Credit: Christopher Evans

TIME TO GO: Defensive back Kyle Arrington and defensive end Rob Ninkovich walk through the locker room yesterday at Gillette Stadium.

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FOXBORO — It’s easy to fall into the trap of the so-called Brady/Belichick era.

You simply turn back the clock to the 2001 season, when Bill Belichick’s coaching and Tom Brady’s quarterbacking led the Patriots to their first Super Bowl championship, and you marvel at the year-in, year-out excellence by a franchise that once floated somewhere between laughingstock and irrelevance.

But while it’s one thing for outsiders to look at the Patriots and point out that the major flaw here is that it’s now going on nine seasons since the last Super Bowl victory, it has to be torture for those members of the team who have never been in on the fun.

They’ve never had a Kodak moment with the Lombardi Trophy. They’ve never been part of a rolling rally. They’ve never danced up on the stage with Robert Kraft. They’ve never been invited to sit on the couch next to Dave or Jay or Conan.

These guys hear about “the era,” about Brady, about Belichick, but in the end they’re no different than anyone who played for the Red Sox pre-2004: Winning is just stuff they read about in history books.

Don’t take my word for it. Come on down, Rob Ninkovich. The veteran defensive end might be one of the toughest guys on the Patriots. His father, a career iron worker, once made the kid spend a summer working on bridge construction “to show him what the real world is all about.” But like everyone he gets weighted down by all the “era” talk.

“That whole era is over with. It’s gone,” Ninkovich said yesterday. “So this is a whole new team. This is a different bunch of guys. We all have to experience it and learn for ourselves what it’s like.”

Read that last line again. We all have to experience it and learn for ourselves what it’s like. And think about it: Unless you’re a high school freshman or younger, you all, as Patriots fans, know what it’s like to celebrate a Super Bowl. The Krafts know. Some of the coaches — Ivan Fears, Dante Scarnecchia — know what it’s like.

Belichick. Brady.

They sure as hell know.

The rest of the room? It’s a banquet hall filled with starving people.

Ninkovich has had a sniff: He was a member of the Patriots team that lost to the Giants last year in Super Bowl XLVI.

“Getting to the Super Bowl last year and losing, that left a bad taste in my mouth,” Ninkovich said. “I would have liked to have gotten back, but that wasn’t the way it happened. It didn’t work out that way. Again, you take all the lessons in life and you learn from them. You try and put your best foot forward the next year.”

But come next year, there will be more talk of “the era,” more talk about how Bill Belichick and Tom Brady have led the Patriots to three Super Bowls, more talk about how maybe this will be the season they win another. And it’s all mindful of what it used to be like on the Bruins before 2011, when Shawn Thornton, one of the most savvy guys in the room, kept telling people to stop asking about the Big, Bad Bruins of yesterday.

Same with the Red Sox and all the pre-2004 smack about 1918.

It’s time to stop wondering when these Patriots are going to win “another” Super Bowl, because the sobering reality is that “these” Patriots have won nothing. Yeah, Brady’s still here and so is Belichick, but recent history teaches us that the presence of this Canton-bound tandem guarantees nothing. They need a better team around them, and for the past eight seasons those teams have not been good enough to win a championship.

If you want to talk dynasty, limit your discussion to three Super Bowls in four seasons. But if you want to talk “era,” then please know that it’s an annoying word to guys like Rob Ninkovich, who have won nothing.

It’s no longer about the Patriots winning another Super Bowl. It’s about winning a Super Bowl, period.